I am enjoying my Easter break from teaching very much.

Happenings

  • Today is Easter Sunday. I spent the day with my family, my parents, and my sister’s family. Super lovely day; our three little ones get a little better at playing with each other every time. I helped my wife design a treasure hunt for the kids to play.
  • Caught up with a friend on Thursday. I played the board game Clank! for the first time. Cool game! You build a deck that gives you resources to traverse a dungeon looking for treasure, but many actions will make a “Clank!”, putting you at greater risk of being attacked by the dragon.
  • Nice activities with the kids — Easter cupcake baking, taking them for a swim (Mr One’s first), feeding ducks (again Mr One’s first).
  • Parents had the littles on Friday night. Wife and I planned to go out to eat, but both felt we had nothing to wear, so we got take-out instead.
  • Decluttering has also been taking place. Within the last few years our lives have changed a lot — new jobs, moving across the country, and having kids. During that time we held on to a lot of stuff because we just didn’t know what our lives were going to look like. Now we know more what we’re working with, turns out there’s a lot we just don’t need anymore.
  • Mr One has been sleeping dreadfully. Tantrums before bed, and late-night tantrums. It’s exhausting.

Links

  • A Potential Termination Event. The global food system is super fragile, despite currently producing abundant food. Failure in one part of the system, such as energy supply, or ecological breakdown, could have catastrophic cascading effects, due to high degrees of capital concentration at various levels within the supply chain. Our politicians aren’t doing much thanks to the lobbying power of these highly concentrated firms.
  • I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. I’d read that the cadence of chatbot writing resembles the English of formerly colonised peoples because the labour that goes into honing the model’s output is done by workers in the global south. This is a different viewpoint; the Kenyan education system and the way LLMs work produce similar styles because they’re essentially selecting for similar characteristics.
  • brennan.day. This is one of the best, most active personal sites on the web at the moment. Brennan is a writer who clearly has a lot to say, and he’s doing it from his own personal site rather than using a platform like Substack, which is very cool. Check out his stuff.
  • writerdeckOS. It’s an operating system that provides tools for writing and nothing else.
  • Top 20 game stories of all time. A cool list from a creator I follow. Several games I love here, and several that are still on the “to-play” list.

Watching

I watched The Plastic Detox on Netflix, about the worrying effects of microplastics on human health. Seems like one of the paradoxes of modernity. In earlier times, underconsumption was harmful to our health. During the industrial revolution, production was harmful to health. Now in modernity, many aspects of our consumption are harmful to our health.

Playing

Still playing Chrono Trigger emulated on my phone, and the Shadow Of The Colossus remake. I’ve not had much time for these activities because of Mr One’s restlessness in the evenings.

Reading

Same deal. Not had much chance to read due to restless toddler. I have started The Right To Oblivion by Lowry Pressly, and it’s great. This first chapter has been a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept of privacy.